Unseen Forces
by ShadowGrace
Summary: My name is Alex Weston. I talk to the dead. I always have. And it's had its own challenges, believe me. But nothing's gotten as bad as this before. I mean, dark evil spirits that are looking for my eternal demise? My only hope is the other ghost-talker, Will Killian. But we don't know if he can actually do anything to help me. I may be on my own for this. RATED T.
1. The Other Freak Show

_**Full Summary:**__**Alex likes to think of herself as a nomad. She doesn't stay in one place for too long. It's the way she's always been. It's the way you have to be when weird things follow you. But this town is different. In this town, there are whispers of a boy like her: a boy who can speak to the dead. What secrets does he hold, and can he help with the evil spirit that follows her?**_

**This is a post Body & Soul fanfiction. If you have not read it, I suggest you jump right on that, because there will most likely be spoilers right off the bat.**

**This is rated T for TEEN, just to be on the safe side.**

**The Ghost & Goth series belongs to Stacey Kade.**

_Unseen Forces_

_1: The Other Freak Show_

I may or may not be insane. _Insane_ isn't a definite word in any context anyway. For one person, it could mean a really great deal at Wally World. For others, it might be the fact that your neighbor claims that aliens are coming to get him. For me, it just means the next step in the process. Because even though I'm not insane _now_, if they don't leave me alone, I will be.

"They" being the ghosts that hang around me when they find out that yes, I can see them and hear them and yes, when they get too close to me they suddenly gain physicality again. And no, I'm not insane. Yet. But remember, _insane_ is objective. I should probably use a better word, or maybe even a phrase: _in need of help. Clinically disabled. Hallucinating psycho._ Something along those lines. But I don't, because there's no point in sugarcoating things. It's always better to be blunt. Direct. That way there are no mind games or hidden meanings or lingering questions.

I don't know why I can see ghosts. I only know that they're there, and that they are smart enough to figure things out if you're not careful. Well, the majority of them are. There are some of them that probably died from their stupidity. My point is that I've always seen them, and they look real for the most part. That is, of course, unless they have some obvious sign of death – bloody clothes, bashed in heads, skid marks running over their flattened middles. Those are some of the more gruesome, of course. There are a lot of people that die naturally, or from things that I can't really see. So I've just learned not to talk to people unless others clearly see them, too.

My Aunt Mila says that I'm antisocial. She doesn't know about the ghosts. She just thinks that I had an extremely active imagination as I child, which carried over into my adult life by making me elusive, creative, and generally a loser. In the end, I never tried to correct her. I would rather her think that I'm just awkward and out of place instead of talking to ghosts. Which I try not to do anymore. It usually means that they're everywhere, and that they won't leave me alone. It usually means that we're up and moving again. When the ghosts find out who you are, they are pretty much unstoppable. And it doesn't help that when they're around me, they get the ability to move things. It's like they're living again, the only catch being that they're invisible to everyone but me.

That's why I'm here, in this sleepy little town. At least, it's sleepy on the living side. There's not much going on with the people that walk the streets daily, waiting for their expiration date to hit. On the other side, though, it's a madhouse. There are so many ghosts here that I feel like it's a personal record. My Aunt Mila is superstitious. She's a hardcore believer in curses from black cats and walking under ladders. And she's scared to death of the occult. She's pretty normal, otherwise. We both just have an intense interest in things that are hard to prove. For instance, I see ghosts. I know about ghosts. I've read up on theories pertaining to them, learned about the light, and figured out that it's easiest to pretend like they're not even there.

Aunt Mila believes that somewhere in the south, the chupacabra hunts goats and cows, that Big Foot lives in the woods, and that there are, in fact, possibilities that the Loch Ness Monster is a dinosaur with extreme survival skills. She thinks that ravens are warnings, that you _have_ to throw salt over your shoulder if you spill it, and that talking about death in a sickroom really is bad juju. The woman doesn't even breathe when we pass a cemetery lot, certain that it offends the dead.

Two totally different things. And she still won't believe me when I say that the dead aren't offended by her breathing. There's rarely any dead there to begin with. Why hang around the cemetery when you can go see the world as an invisible tourist?

The point is that I don't tell her about the ghosts, certain that she would either call me a devil spawn or think that I was so messed up that I needed to be institutionalized. So when the ghosts get too much to handle and it's time to move on again, I just have to plant the seed of doubt in Aunt Mila's head. She's really into signs and horoscopes and the like, so it's easy enough to tell her that we need to move on. At worst, I do something totally drastic that has her thinking I'm well on my way to becoming a juvenile delinquent.

For a woman that believes in almost anything she hears, she certainly is prejudiced against ghost-talkers.

That's what I am, a ghost-talker. I would have never heard the word if I hadn't met a ghost in her mid-thirties that more belonged in the pre-American era. Her English name was Sleepy River, so I called her SR. She had haunted the house that Aunt Mila and my mother had grown up in, and when she realized that I could see ghosts, she quickly became a guardian to me. SR had lived for so long that she'd picked up several languages. She had died, apparently, in a raid on her village and had lost her husband and two children. They had already moved on to the light. SR had chosen to stick around and find what she needed to do to pass on to the next life. Secretly, I think she's stuck here because all she ever wanted to be was a mother, and after losing her two young children she never got to see them grow up. I guess I had sort of replaced her kids, because she'd been following me ever since. When I was five, she was my best friend. When I made the mistake of talking to other ghosts who immediately flocked to me, SR told them to back off, that I was hers. And with that, she'd become my spirit guide.

SR was the one that taught me everything that I knew about the ghosts. She had laughed at me when I picked up _ESP for Dummies_. That day, she sat me down and told me about the light, how ghosts struggle to move on from the limbo that is earth. That day, I had made it my goal to help ghosts cross over to the light. That is, the ones that deserved it. SR used to be a hermit, but ever since I made it clear that I had decided what to do with my ghost-talking gift, she had become like a mother to me, as well as the receptionist and CEO of the Alex Helps Ghosts Foundation.

Walking down the street of a new town, SR keeping pace behind me, I did my best to ignore the ghosts. I mean, it wasn't like they were _everywhere_, but the fact that I saw more than one or two on my walk from our new apartment to the 7-Eleven down the street meant that there was an uncomfortably larger number hanging around than what I was used to. What was nice, though, was that ghosts that saw SR behind me thought that I was being haunted by her. She still had her Native American dress going, with the skinned animals that served as a strapless dress that reached a little above her knees, the moccasins, and the leather adorned with bear teeth and the like. She even had a tattoo that covered one of her shoulders. In all her authenticity, she was able to pull off the "this girl is haunted by an Indian curse" thing.

Anyway, it meant that instead of quietly conversing with my spirit guide slash best friend, I kept my head down, eyes on the sidewalk cracks as I headed towards the nearest gas station for my Slurpee fix. It was always so easy to seem like I should be left alone. People put so much thought and judgment into others without really taking the time to get to know them. "Thou shalt not judge" and all that jazz is _totally_ inapplicable to life. For instance: me. I _try_ to look standoffish and lonely, a person who has baggage and can't be bothered. It's easier that way. People don't want the psychotic-looking new girl for a best friend, and that I can deal with. It also means that people have a way of swerving around me, as if my black and neon clothes are going to give them a heart attack or something. But besides all of that, I _like_ my style. It's not so mainstream. It's perfect for a girl who has completely off-base in an abnormal type of way.

Paired together, SR and I look totally incompatible. She's got that naturalistic thing going on, with her animal skins and leather. She also had an extreme distaste for makeup (which I love.) Her black-as-night hair reached down to the middle of her back, her eyes close-set and large, deep brown in color. In comparison, I look like I was hit by the eighties' punk revolution. My hair is naturally a dark brown that borders on black. I keep it short and wispy, and since it's pretty thick and bouncy, I have a way of making it curl away from my face in one of those messy punk-dos. I dyed the tips of my hair purple, crimson, and teal blue. Eyeliner is a _must_, and it has to have wings that come out on the side of my eyes. My fingernails are perpetually painted black and I avoid skirts like they have the plague.

Therefore, SR and I are different. SR tells me, sometimes in a reprimanding way, that I'm marring the sense of womanly fashion, as if I'm supposed to look like a little princess. Aunt Mila describes me as being artistic (it helps the fact that I can draw pretty well) with a side of punk. I just say that I'm comfortable in what I'm in and that I like it.

I've had the conversation with SR more times than I could count, and it was the current topic of today as I skipped over a crack out of habit. Aunt Mila had told me not to step on the cracks when I was a kid because they would break my mother's back. Even after my mom died and I was sanctioned to Aunt Mila, I still had the habit of avoiding them in the sidewalk, partially because Aunt Mila had become my new mom, and partly because old habits die hard.

"You cannot, and I repeat, _cannot_ put a piercing through your lip." SR told me as I reached the door for 7-Eleven. Pulling it open, I stepped inside the slightly cramped floor, ignoring the look from the cashier as I scanned the rows of candy and packaged snack cakes. I was just humoring myself because I knew that I would end up with a Slurpee, but I always gave myself the option. You never know when a time might present itself that you decide you _don't_ want your usual and want to take a chance every now and then.

I glanced up over the racks, scanning for any other ghosts. I could deal with living people. They think that I'm just crazy or like to talk to myself. Ghosts, though, can put two and two together when they see SR next to me. The only other two-legged being in the room was the cashier, and he was real enough, chewing bubblegum and looking down at one of the magazines he should have been trying to sell. Under my breath, I said, "SR, it's _just_ a piercing. It's all the rage these days. Live a little."

The irony was not lost on my spirit guide (props to me for teaching her the art of sarcasm) and she leaned against the rack nearby. I didn't know if she initially hung around me so much because of the physicality she gained or because she was honestly drawn to the helpless child that needed answers. Either way, she didn't seem to mind it as she played with a candy bar in its cardboard box. I glanced at the cashier out of the corner of my eye, making sure that he couldn't see the candy magically moving "by itself." SR was extremely old-fashioned and proper, but she also had a vicious side to her that was, honestly, very scary. And she took her job as a ghostly mother to me very seriously. She probably wouldn't have minded if I wanted to get a tattoo, even if I told her it would be a magical unicorn jumping over a rainbow on my butt, as long as I told her it meant something. She had a tattoo herself. But shoving a piece of metal through your skin that weren't either the ears or the septum of your nose was like taboo to her.

"I do not need to _live a little_, as you put it. In case you can't remember, I'm dead." She replied.

I gave a little shrug, hissing under my breath, "But I really want one."

"Wanting does not constitute getting," she answered in her usual tone. SR had an annoying habit of speaking in riddles. I think she was trying to teach me something, in a way. But it wasn't really helping if I couldn't even figure out what she was saying. This time, it was relatively easy. But I knew that the more we argued, the less her words were going to make sense.

"Could you _not_ speak in like you're a freaking fortune cookie?" I asked quietly as I stepped around the candy aisle and into the chip aisle. Scanning over bags of pre-packaged cardboard with flavoring, I let my eyes run down the different types of trail mixes and pretzel packets. Finally, I decided that there wasn't really anything else for them to offer and slipped around to the back next to the soda dispenser and Slurpee machine. I picked out the biggest cup and popped on the lid, mixing the flavors until I was almost sure that I had the perfect mixture of cherry and blue raspberry. I called it a Superman Slurpee.

This time, my sarcasm was lost on SR. "I'm not Chinese," she said indignantly, as if I could have forgotten her roots.

"Fortune cookies were actually first made in San Francisco, so technically you're not a Californian." I told her as I unwrapped my straw and took a sip of my drink. Heading up to the counter, I pulled out a couple of one dollar bills and handed them over to the cashier. He looked at me like I might try to rob him any second. Please. If I really wanted to rob a gas station, I would get SR or some other invisible friend to do it for me. Not that I would ever rob anybody, because that kind of stunt could land you in jail, and that is _not_ a happy place to be.

Take it from the only living friend that I'd maintained for more than three years. He had a stunt in juvie for auto theft, and that was just a juvenile detention center. Aunt Mila said I wasn't allowed to be friends with him anymore.

Taking my change and shoving it into the pocket of my skinny jeans, I slipped out of the 7-Eleven and started walking again. I never really had to worry about getting lost. SR was like a GPS of sorts. I still had no idea how she did it. But even then, Aunt Mila was only a phone call away if I seriously got lost. My fingers cold from my frozen slushie drink, I continued to walk down the sidewalk, avoiding the gaze of the other pedestrians. SR didn't usually talk unless she had something to say to me, especially when there were other ghosts around. Her story that she was haunting me wouldn't cover very well if she and I were talking about mundane things. Like the possibility of a lip ring in my future. It didn't exactly scream _haunting_, unless you were deathly afraid of needles, emphasis on _deathly_.

Letting the conversation die for a while, I took in the surrounding area. The buildings in this part of town were older than the others that I'd already seen. Nearby was the high school, still in session. Thank God I graduated last year, because school was a total pain in the butt. First of all, kids like me don't tend to fit in well, even in the largest of schools were there are sure to be students that have a strange love for black and a fascination with the occult and Ouija boards. As it was, I was too weird for the normal people and too normal for the weird kids. How helpful. And second, I was always the new kid, and after a certain amount of time, you just don't want to try anymore.

SR and I continued past the school – there were two ghosts in front of it, by the way – and down to a little park-like area that had trees, a small pond that was in desperate need of being cleaned up, and a few little benches. I sat down on one of the benches, trying to ignore the bird poop splattering the arms. SR sat down at the other end, completely unbothered by bird feces like I was. I pulled my feet up onto the bench and sipped through my straw, watching the area around us.

"There aren't any more spirits lingering," SR said after a moment of silence. She turned to look at me, her eyes narrowed in what I had named Classic Mom Glare #1. "Please, remind me what compels you to get a ring through your lip. It is tasteless and carries no meaning."

I shrugged, stirring my Slurpee with the straw. "I just want one, SR. Aunt Mila probably won't care. And it's just a piercing. Besides, it'll look cool."

My spirit guide rolled her eyes at me, as if I was personally causing her problems. "Every time I think I get used to the century, you living change completely." She complained. She wasn't even looking at me, her gaze instead focused on a squirrel perching in a tree. SR had always had a weird sort of connection with nature. I had always wondered if it was like Disney said it was in Pocahontas. Colors of the wind, and all that jazz. But I never really got up the guts to ask her. She was forthcoming with almost everything except her past, and she liked to keep it that way. I only knew what I knew from years of piecing her story together.

Besides, if I was wrong, she'd want to know where I got the notion from. Then I would have to let her watch the movie and listen to her rant about the strangeness of it all; mostly the way we living rewrote history to fit our outlooks. If she were still living, I was on the verge of believing that SR would be a conspiracy theorist.

"Where were you in the nineties?" I asked, referring to the grunge look most people had gone for.

"Following you around," she replied a little indignantly. "You were just a child, then." She added.

I opened my mouth to reply but cut off immediately when I heard voices. One of them had a British accent and was annoyingly proper. The other was prim, more like the seventies or whenever they'd done the entire "rad moves, dude" excuse for slang. I chanced a glance over my shoulder as SR looked up to follow my gaze. She stayed where she was, though, not even bothering to look for them herself.

They came up the path together, one of them a woman dressed in what I would describe as colonist clothing (not something that I saw all that often, honestly.) She must have been the one that sounded like she better belonged in the Queen of England's court than this small town. The other looked like a hippie with long, greasy blonde hair and torn clothes. He lifted a hand as if he'd been trying to explain something to the colonist girl a thousand times and she still hadn't figured it out. I knew what that meant. I'd had the same feeling after trying to explain things to SR.

I slurped at my drink and pulled out my phone, trying to make it look like I really was just a lonely teenager chilling on a bench in the park. I had the feeling that if I'd had some bread with me I'd be throwing it out onto the sidewalk, trying to look as nonchalant as possible. SR pretended not to even look at me, her gaze fixed on a group of ants surrounding what looked to be a potato chip.

The colonial girl looked a little disgusted when she saw SR there, and I wondered if she'd been killed in a raid, like SR had. I often found myself marveling at the differences on people's perspective. I felt bad for SR, because she'd just been living her life with her kids when she died. It made me want to sneer at the colonial girl. But before I learned my spirit guide's story, I probably would have thought that it was unfair for Native Americans to fight the colonists when they had just tried to expand their horizons. Perspectives were annoying, and it was probably the reason that I had never done too well in English or Speech.

The hippie boy nodded to SR as he continued to talk to the colonial girl. "Yeah, man." He said. The girl looked a little annoyed at being called a man, but she hid it fairly well. I tried not to let my eyes follow them as they walked past. "Word on the street is that Will Killian's spirit guide stuffed herself into a new body." He explained.

"The ghost-talker boy?" The girl asked. "I wonder how that works. I don't think it matters all that much, anyway. He never wanted to help us, and Alona wasn't much better." She replied.

They continued down the path, disappearing around the corner. The moment they were gone, I turned wide-eyed to SR. She was looking at me with an expression that said she thought I was going to do something drastic and possibly very dangerous. In truth, I probably was going to do something that she would not approve of. Like find the ghost-talker boy, Will Killian.

I had never met another ghost-talker. Whenever I moved to a new town, I spent my time trying to avoid the rest of the world's population instead of digging around and trying to make new friends. Though I wasn't sure if I could consider another ghost-talker a friend. SR had mentioned something about a ghost-talker's hierarchy, sort of like a president and his followers or something. I wasn't really clear on the whole council thing and since I had always kept to myself, I hadn't bothered to learn anymore about it. Eventually SR had stopped trying to explain it to me. But now, maybe it would have been beneficial to actually pay attention to her rants.

"SR, this would be the very first time that I would meet another ghost-talker," I explained, the whole debacle about my pending lip ring forgotten. Even though I generally hated crowds and other people, the thought that there was someone else out there that dealt with the same things as me, someone who _wasn't_ already dead, was something that I couldn't pass up. The moment this Will Killian's name had passed ghost boy's lips, I'd decided that this was something that I could probably look into.

"I did not say anything. You don't have to take such a persuasive tone with me already." She said, eyeing me. I knew she probably wasn't too keen on me finding someone else. SR had always been a little paranoid, and even though she would always be my spirit guide, she seemed to think that dabbling with other people like me would only lead to trouble and heartache.

"I just know you won't like it." I replied, stirring my Slurpee with the straw. "_Please_, SR. I'm almost nineteen. I'm legally an adult," I added.

SR shook her head. "Fine. We will look into it, but I cannot guarantee that you will find what you're looking for."

"I wasn't aware that I was looking for anything," I told her.

"Our lives are spent looking for its meaning and our destiny," she said.

I rolled my eyes as I stood up, taking another long pull from my drink. "Okay, I promise not to get my hopes up about finding all the answers to my unasked questions." I told her. SR rolled her eyes as I turned back towards the apartment where I lived with Aunt Mila. "Let's begin our search. We need to find the other freak show."

**I hope you all enjoyed this. Now that the chapter is over, I ask that you favorite/follow this story if you're looking for more. I also ask that you leave me a review with your comments/criticism in the box below. I would really appreciate it. Not to mention that even guests can leave a message. Just please, don't be crude with language.**

**I apologize in advance for any spelling/grammatical errors. Being the lazy writer that I am, I tend to write the chapter and just upload it immediately. So sorry for that (though I do try to reread through some of it.) Thank you for taking the time to read this. Check back for updates! Peace. (:**


	2. Creepy Old Boxes

**BreeTico – Thanks! It doesn't surprise me to see you around. I think we're like, book-reading twins. Lol (;**

**Tosho – Why thank you. And I am writing, I promise! Sometimes, it just… takes me a little while. Haha.**

**Jislane35 – Can I ask who you're talking about? Forgive me, I'm just a little confused. If you're talking about Alex, I didn't mean to pick a name from a character that's already in the book. This Alex in this fanfiction is a figment of my imagination with a little inspiration from Stacey Kade. Thanks for the review! (:**

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**xXDeathIsAPromiseXx – Thank you! I've seen a few of the other fanfictions for Ghost & the Goth, but I haven't really given any of them a read since I have a short patience with other writers because I'm so nit-picky. Haha! Thanks for the review! (:**

**The Ghost & Goth Series belongs to Stacey Kade.**

_2: Creepy Old Boxes_

For some reason, I thought it was going to be incredibly easy to find someone in this town. Like I said, it was pretty slow on the living side. I figured all I would have to do is look around and this Will Killian would just appear in front of me. Or maybe I thought he was going to jump out in front of me saying, "I'm Will Killian! I'm the ghost-talker you're looking forward!"

But as my Aunt Mila always says, that kind of stuff never happens. If you really want to find something you've _got_ to look for it. She also says that whatever you're looking for is in the last place you look. I always had to refrain from telling her that of course it was. Why, I often wondered, would someone continue to look after they already found what they were looking for?

The point was that I had no idea where to even start. I doubted that the ghost-talker boy would be at the cemetery, because that would be pointless. Unless he wanted some peace and quiet, which would make it _the_ place to be. But if he hung out there for too long, stereotypes would get a hold of him, and they'd never let go. I had first-hand experience on that one. It was several years ago, tens of towns ago, where I'd found a beautiful peace. SR had even left me alone when I was there for a little while, though I knew she was always watching from a distance. My haven had been found out, and I'd been tacked with the nickname of _Death Girl_. At that age, I'd been deeply wounded by the fact that people I knew – even friends – could just turn on me like that. And then there was the atrocity of the nickname, which didn't even make much sense. It was poorly thought out, if you asked me. But after a little while, I embraced the title and wielded it to my advantage.

Still, stereotypes had a way of worming deep into your soul and infecting it, especially when you didn't wear a tough, invisible armor. "If you don't stop making that face, it'll get stuck that way."

I glanced up. "Thank you, SR. Your words of wisdom astound me in their pure brilliance."

She folded her legs underneath her as she perched next to me. The two of us had found a cemetery as a last-ditch effort to find Will Killian without involving other people. In a town this small, word could get around fast. People would know that a weird-looking girl was looking for Will Killian, and that would mar whatever social status he'd set up for himself. Just because I was a weirdo didn't mean _all_ ghost-talkers were weirdos.

"Your impatience has never brought out the best in you." She commented lightly. A leaf blew by, catching in her hair. She reached up and nonchalantly brushed it out. I wondered, as I often did, what it felt like to be dead and unable to touch things. Or what it felt like after being unable to interact with anything for years and then to suddenly be able to touch things again. They were questions that I could have easily asked SR, but I never did. She was always so private about her past life and her feelings. All she pretended to care about was me. While I secretly reveled in the fact that she paid complete and total attention to me, I wished that I could know things about her. She knew _everything_ about me. And I mean everything. Even the embarrassing things.

"Your riddles have never brought out the best in you," I replied sharply. I bit down on my tongue the moment the words were out. I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. If she really wanted to, she'd just leave me until tomorrow, when she showed up in my room at roughly five in the morning, the time of the raid and the time of her death. But she didn't look bothered in the least. In fact, she just seemed a little peeved, as if I'd just told her that I liked to eat mayonnaise out of the jar. (I don't even like mayonnaise, but that's beside the point.)

"I know you're frustrated, Alex," she said after a moment. "But that doesn't give you the right to take out your angers on others, especially those that have helped you in the past." Her words didn't even sound hurt, but I knew she was. I opened my mouth to say that I was sorry, something that I didn't say very often. I didn't like the sound of it, if that made any sense. I thought it was sort of a sign of weakness. I've had first-hand experience with that, too. You apologize for something stupid, and they think they've won an unspoken battle.

I leaned forward, elbows resting on my jean-clad knees. There was a hole in one of the knees. Around it, I'd used a black permanent marker to draw lopsided hearts and an old, withered tree. I was particularly proud of the tree; I'd even got down the markings of the bark and the suggestion of hundreds upon hundreds of leaves. I balanced precariously on top of a thick tombstone. It belonged to a Mrs. Myrtle Smith. Looking down at the batch of worn fabric flowers in a stone vase, I guessed that no one had been around to visit her lately. "You ever feel like there's something _really_ important about to happen, and you've just got to find out what it is before it happens?" I asked.

SR nodded. "All the time," she said softly. I glanced over at her, but she wasn't looking at me. Her eyes seemed far away, as if she was looking back on the past. Maybe a past that I couldn't remember, because it was hundreds of years before I was born. I would never know unless I asked. As if that was ever going to happen.

"I feel that, right now, with Will Killian," I told her. The name bumped around inside my skull like a bad echo. I _needed_ to know who he was. Maybe SR would have some sort of knowledge about it. She was my spirit guide, after all. I didn't know if that meant that she had an infinite well of information at her disposal or anything. We never really talked about the specifics. But if I had to guess it would be a no. It was still worth a shot, though. I was taking suggestions at this point. "Do you know anything about it?"

"Me?" SR looked around, as if she thought I'd been talking to someone else. "No, I have no clue. My priority has always been you, and even then I sometimes find myself a step behind."

So, no infinite well of knowledge. I guess that was for the better. If I found out that she was a secret genius with future-seeing abilities and _still_ refused to help me on my tests when I was still in school, I'd be pissed. "Do you think you could, I don't know, maybe talk to some of the others hanging around? They seem to know some stuff about him."

SR eyed me. "I've already met some of them, and none of them are very forthcoming with information. I didn't ask about the boy, of course, but they seemed like they didn't even want to tell me their names. Any information I get from them will come for a price. Besides, if they know about a ghost-talker they're probably waiting in line to get their message across. They won't want to tell me about him, just in case I manage to find my way in front of them."

"Why are all you ghosts so obnoxious?" I asked.

"Why are all you living so ignorant?" She countered.

I stuck my tongue out at her, and she stood up swiftly. Her hair blew in the wind, black tendrils flying behind her. She once told me that she found it weird that the elements touched her again. When she was just a ghost, the wind would blow and not a hair would move out of place. In my mind's eye, I'd seen all those girls that use half a can of hairspray a day. Their hair, while extremely flammable, probably wouldn't budge in hurricane-force winds. "I will see what information I can get from the others. Do not, under any circumstances, let any of them know you can see them." She said. "One ghost-talker seems to be enough for them. Those that are waiting for this boy to help them are going to flock right to you. And if they've been turned down once, they won't take too kindly to being turned down again."

"I know," I said. I held up to fingers and said, "I won't dare talk to another body-less soul. Scout's honor."

SR just rolled her eyes and left me alone in a cemetery.

# # #

"Aunt Mila?" I called as I stepped into the apartment. We were on the second floor, in the only apartment that the complex had open. Aunt Mila said that it was a lucky find, but I wasn't too sure on that. The apartment was the kind of place that made me want to clean every corner, and I'm so lazy that I almost _never_ clean. The light bulbs outside on the walkway were covered with dirt and cobwebs. The number two on the front of our door hung upside down. But inside, it wasn't as bad. Maybe because my aunt had cleaned every corner. As I walked in, she peeled off a pair of banana yellow rubber gloves.

"Hi," she said, smiling at me. My Aunt Mila was my mother's sister. They actually looked a lot alike, to the point that sometimes I really could imagine that she was my mother and not my aunt. They shared hair so dark brown it bordered on black and stormy blue eyes, two physical genes that had been passed down to me. "Did you find the 7-Eleven?" She asked.

I nodded. My Slurpee was long gone. I glanced down at the basket that she was holding. "What's all that stuff?"

"The Yoon's, our next door neighbors, dropped off some housewarming treats." She said, holding out the basket to my inspection. There was a bright red ribbon tied around the handle of the basket, but beyond that was a collection of brownies, cookies, and what looked to be cinnamon rolls. It looked like someone was a baker. Maybe even a nervous baker, at that. I loved nervous bakers. They were anxiety-prone and usually gave their extra sweets to me.

"Awesome," I said, reaching in to take one of the chocolate cookies. It was huge, easily the size of my face. My stomach growled. Right before my fingers brushed the cellophane-wrapped cookie, though, my aunt wrenched the basket away.

"You can't have any of these until after dinner." She said. I rolled my eyes. Sometimes my aunt liked to act like a parent, but we both knew that she was too laid back for that. Aunt Mila was a journalist and photographer. My mom always said that Aunt Mila had a way of seeing things that nobody else could. I sometimes wondered if that made her crazy, like seeing ghosts was bound to make me crazy one day.

I took a deep breath. "I don't smell anything," I said.

"Just because I said you have to wait until after dinner doesn't mean that I have it done." She said, wrinkling her nose at me. "Go sit down in the kitchen. I'm making macaroni and cheese. With extra cheese," she specified. She gave me a slight grin and held the basket behind her as I passed, as if I was going to lunge at her and force her to give it to me.

The apartment kitchen was small, with minimal counter space, a tiny refrigerator, small gas stove, and a microwave that we had to plug in and set in the corner next to the toaster. Aunt Mila had all the cabinets open, so I could see our dented cans of peeled tomatoes and chicken noodle soup. I had to stand up on my tiptoes to reach the canister of uncooked noodles Aunt Mila lugged around in every move. The jar had a lid that locked like an old diary of mine, a small metal tab that you had to twist and pull out to open. The canister was hand-painted with fat pink pigs and lime green grass. It was, in short, one of the most hideous things I'd ever seen, but Aunt Mila loved it. She had a thing for farm-themed kitchen things (she had a whisk that had a handle that looked like a chicken egg with chic feet, eyes, and a beak; a goose cookie jar; the pig noodle canister; and a set of serving platters that had cows painted on them.)

Aunt Mila came in behind me and pushed aside a bunch of papers to make room for the basket. She took the noodles from my hand and dug in the bottom cabinets for one of our ancient pots. "Grab the Velveeta, will you?" She asked, nodding towards the fridge. I did, pulling out the cardboard box and setting it on the counter.

"What did you do all day?" I asked, inching closer to the housewarming basket. Aunt Mila filled the pot with water and flicked on the stove. I watched silently from the other side of the counter. She'd already tacked our month-by-month calendar onto the wall by the kitchen table, and set up a blue-tinted vase with its usual fake sunflowers.

"Unpacked," she said. She turned around briefly to narrow her eyes at me, and then returned her focus to the pot of boiling water in front of her. "I didn't touch your room, though. Go unpack it. Dinner should be ready in a few." I grunted in agreement, slid a humongous cookie from the housewarming basket, and slipped down the short hall to my bedroom. Aunt Mila would never know.

Unless she counted the cookies in the basket, which I wouldn't put past her.

By bedroom was small, barely big enough for my full-sized bed, squat book case, and desk that I used more as a makeup table and storage space than a place to do homework. There was a tiny window in my bedroom that had drawn blinds. It opened up to the walkway just outside the apartment. It would make a good place to sneak out if I had to, if not for the fact that Aunt Mila's room was on the opposite side of the apartment (which wasn't far, but still) and she was a decently heavy sleeper. And then there was the fact that even though I was relatively petite and only slightly curvy in the hips, I doubted that I could fit through the window without some sort of contortionism.

I took a deep breath and eyed the beige builder-grade carpet and matching off-white walls. Aunt Mila had obviously cleaned, but she hadn't done much else besides pull the sheets tight on my bed. The comforter was dark charcoal gray with pink pinstripes. A collection of stuffed animals was piled on top. I sat down on the floor and used my fingernail to cut through the tape on one of the boxes. It was completely filled with clothes, which I slowly started to unpack while eating the cookie the Yoon's had brought over. It was still chewy, just the way I liked it. I decided that I liked the Yoon's.

I heard my aunt coming down the hall and quickly shoved the rest of the cookie in my mouth, mourning the fact that I couldn't savor the chocolate chips. "Dinner's ready, Alex," she called out to me. I grumbled back in return, trying not to let on to the fact that I had snuck one of the cookies from the basket. After I chewed and swallowed and checked my teeth for chocolate residue, I slunk back to the kitchen.

Aunt Mila and I had a kitchen table, but we almost never used it. One reason was that Aunt Mila wasn't a huge fan of traditionalism. She hated t when people compared things to the "regular family," the one that was made up of a mom and a dad and two-point-five kids and a dog. So our own tradition was to eat in the living room, watching the suspense drama of the night while we sat in front of TV tray holders. She was that way about almost everything. At Christmas we put up a foil Christmas tree that was no taller than my arm was long on the coffee table and hid each other's gifts somewhere in the house, leaving scavenger hunt clues to find them. At Thanksgiving, we made lasagna and garlic bread since neither of us was a huge fan of turkey (and there wasn't a reason to make a whole turkey for just the two of us) and every Halloween we doused the lights and watched horror movies all night with an endless supply of salted popcorn and Sprite.

So it was to the living room that I took my bowl of macaroni and cheese. Aunt Mila had already set up the two tables with napkins and forks, and she put the pepper shaker on the corner of my table, since I put pepper on nearly _everything_. We ate while watching the newest episode of House, and then I helped her clean up the kitchen. By that time, she was dead tired from cleaning and unpacking all day, so she went to her bedroom and I headed off to mine. She never said anything about a missing cookie from the housewarming basket.

I sat down on my bedroom floor and finished unpacking my clothes, books, and other things. It took me hours to get everything where I wanted them, and by time I finished it was well past midnight. Aunt Mila was probably already asleep, and SR hadn't come back yet, so I was all alone. After deciding that my room was as clean as it was ever going to be, I decided to explore the rest of the apartment. It shouldn't take too long, but I'd learned from countless moves that if there was anything about rent houses or apartments, there were almost always things left behind from the previous family.

Aunt Mila had already cleaned the entire place, but she didn't know where the best places to look for forgotten things were. I'd discovered long ago that they were the top shelves in every closet, the water heater, and the creepy little storage room if there was one. Some of the apartments had little sheds on their back patio, and Aunt Mila wouldn't think to look in there

So I started searching, looking for anything interesting or out of the ordinary. I started in my closet and the tiny coat closet in the hall, checked the bottom cabinets in the bathroom and every cabinet in the kitchen. By time I finished that, I'd only found an old penny from the sixties, a little baggie of mix-matched buttons, and enough dust to cause me sinus problems for the rest of my life. I decided that it was nearly impossible to search Aunt Mila's bathroom or closet, so I stepped out onto the back patio. Sure enough, there was a little storage closet with a lock. It was unlocked, probably because we were on the second floor, so I didn't have to search for any extra keys.

Twisting the knob, I opened the storage to reveal two pool noodles that had probably been in there for years, a couple of fold-up chairs that looked like they were broken, and in the very back corner, an old warped shoebox that was covered with an old kitchen towel that was stained with dirt, rain, and age. Kicking aside the gross towel, I peered down at the shoebox. For some reason, I felt like there was something important in there. It was probably nothing, but that didn't stop me from crouching down and pulling the box to me. Trying to touch as little of the box as possible, I lifted the lid slowly.

Nestled inside was a whole bunch of old pictures, pictures that were stained yellow with age and warped from heat and rain. Some of them looked like someone had tried to burn them, their edges charred and black. I flipped one of them over. There wasn't a name or a date printed on it. I checked some of the others. Not a single photograph gave any indication as to who was in the pictures or when they were taken.

Flipping through those, I found that the cloth that they'd been wrapped in was a handkerchief with the initials _E.C.W._ I had no idea what it stood for, but I could tell from the threadbare feeling that it was old, probably just as old as the photographs that it had been covering. Another handkerchief was in the shoebox, balled up around something. I slowly undid the tight knot it was in.

Inside the satiny handkerchief was a silvery gold chain. I wasn't really sure what color it was in the dark. All I knew was that a wire of the same color metal held a stone that was either black, purple, or dark red. It was cold to the touch, as big as my thumbnail, and securely attached to the chain. I thought that it looked beautiful. Why would anyone want to tuck away a necklace like this inside a handkerchief and a bunch of old photographs?

I sat there, crouched in the doorway of the storage closet, for a good five minutes. The necklace twisted in the slight wind that blew across the patio. I felt like I was in a trance as I looked at it. There was a history to it, I knew, and I felt like it was calling to me. It was all very weird. There were several questions shooting off at rapid fire, burning in my mind. Why would someone leave a necklace like this behind? What did it have to do with the monogramed handkerchiefs and the pictures? Why did I feel like I'd just found something very, _very_ important?

With a slight sigh, I wrapped the necklace in the handkerchief I'd found it in, tucked in back in the box, and ignored the feelings of _Oh God, it's so germy_ as I picked up the box and carried it carefully to my bathroom. Bringing out another shoebox, I transferred the items without taking another look at the necklace and then hid the new shoebox in my closet. I tossed the old shoebox in the open dumpster at the far end of the walkway.

Shaking out my hands, I turned to head back to my apartment, so I could wash my hands and maybe get some sleep. But I didn't get very far before I realized that SR was standing in the doorway, with her arms crossed over her chest.

**I think this is a somewhat short chapter. If I'm going to be honest, I decided to change some things around when it came to the plot of this little fanfiction. I decided that it's probably going to be novella-length (which is what most of the stories are around here, I think.)**

**Anyway, please excuse any spelling or grammatical errors in this chapter (or in this whole story.) I literally sat down, opened a word document, typed this up and then uploaded it. If you're a new reader to my stories, you'll find that's the norm.**

**Thank you so much for taking the time to read this. Please leave me a review! I'd love to know what you think! Peace (:**


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